Comments

Comment by Anonymiter

As prot its odd when comparing these to Pauldrons of the High Requiem. You trade a lot of dodge% for what would seem like a lot more threat generation. You probably won't have enough room to sacrifice defensive stats for threat on blue items like this, but later tiers are going to ridiculous.

Comment by pherexian

Comment by rnbw

In any case Earthshape Pauldrons are better in almost any way (except threat, which isn't be a problem for most classes). Unfortunately, they drop from a boss in a quite difficult heroic (Grim Batol).

If you are having threat problems, you should read up on a better rotation. :P

I bought these anyway, because the Grim Batol ones wouldn't drop for me. I used them to cover the time it took to get the Grim Batol ones (which are obviously better).

Edit: why am I being rated down? Is this information incorrect? If so, please point it out in the comments. :)

Comment by Glahmgold

You got to think of these in the context of the whole general mish-mash too though. Meaning, if you are replacing the Gnomblitration handguard i325 (which have hit) to the i346 JP ones (Numbing Handguard), you lose a lot of hit for the upgrade. These shoulders compensate nicely on the loss of hit and get you to i346 all around. It's just a matter of where the items and stats get jumbled around to eliminate miss chance, maximize avoidance, max threat, reduce mob dodge to 0%, etc.

These are a good and needed item at the i346 level; and, you'll probably need to replace these first, over the gloves or face some heroics with an uncomfortable level of miss chance, until you can round out the slots.

Comment by Cindernella

For tanks trying to go for avoidance tanking, this provides more avoidance rating than Earthshape Pauldrons if dodge/parry is more important for tanking (fights like Halfus and Chimeron). With reforging hit to parry and gemming Flashing Inferno Ruby, you get a total of:

215 dodge rating84 parry rating67 hit rating

Comment by rnbw

You got to think of these in the context of the whole general mish-mash too though. Meaning, if you are replacing the Gnomblitration handguard i325 (which have hit) to the i346 JP ones (Numbing Handguard), you lose a lot of hit for the upgrade. These shoulders compensate nicely on the loss of hit and get you to i346 all around. It's just a matter of where the items and stats get jumbled around to eliminate miss chance, maximize avoidance, max threat, reduce mob dodge to 0%, etc.

These are a good and needed item at the i346 level; and, you'll probably need to replace these first, over the gloves or face some heroics with an uncomfortable level of miss chance, until you can round out the slots.

I'm sorry to say, but you have to do some reading up about tanking. Threat stats are entirely unimportant right now, because threat is not an issue at all. Even with 0 hit and 0 expertise any tank should be able to hold aggro perfectly fine (unless of course you're using your abilities incorrectly). Because of this, tanks want to only focus on survivability stats, primarily mastery, dodge and parry.

When you can choose between an item with mastery/avoidance or an item with hit/avoidance, it will always be a no-brainer: choose the mastery/avoidance one. No matter what your current hit rating is.

If you upgrade your 325 item with hit to a 346 item without hit, there's no need at all to "offset" the "lost" hit on another item such as these shoulderplates. As I said in my comment above, the ones that drop in Grim Batol are far superiour to these. You will want to grab them if you're lucky enough to get them. Until then, these are a nice filler. :)

Comment by Reddrick

I have made what I think is a blue tanking set purchasable with Justice Points. It also matches visually.